Page:A Book of the West (vol. 2).djvu/263

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
SALE OF THE BOROUGH
199


brought him. Swift, writing to Stella at the time, says that, "while the duke was over him, Mohun shortened his sword, and stabbed him in the shoulder to the heart." According to the evidence of the surgeons who examined the bodies, each had received four frightful wounds, and both appeared to have given each other the mortal thrust at the same instant.

Fowey has for long been a nursery of Treffrys and Rashleighs, though the latter really issue from a place called by the same name near Eggesford, in Devon, where is an interesting old house, their mansion, with beautiful Elizabethan plaster-work, and their very peculiar arms—a cross or between, in the dexter chief quarter a Cornish chough arg., beaked and legged gu., in the sinister chief quarter a text T, and in base two crescents, all arg. A coat, this, that suggests that some story must be connected with its origin, but what that story was is now for- gotten. The history of Fowey is interwoven with that of the Rashleighs and the Treffrys.

Fowey was one of the rotten boroughs that were disfranchised. It was created by Elizabeth in 1571. In 1813 the borough manor of Fowey, formerly the property of the Duchy, passed from the control of the Rashleighs to Lucy of Charlescot, in Warwickshire; it was sold for £20,000 and an expenditure of £60,000 to acquire whole influence over voters. The Lucys opposed Lord Valletort, who had represented the borough since 1790—a long time for a Cornish borough—and desperate contests ensued, with varying success. When disfranchisement came they found they had laid out vast sums, and had nothing to show for it.